Scams and Frauds in the Imperium
- Thread starter phavoc
- Start date
I haven't looked at it in quite a while - and even longer for the excellent GURPS books.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Trade wars are covered extensively in The Traveller Adventure.
Makers are assembler/disassembler, CAD/CAM, 3D printers, on stroids. They need the correct raw materials to make their stuff, the correct raw materials may even include chips that are better manufactured in dedicated chip manufactories.
Traveller fusion power makes any process that requires lots of energy in the here and now relativley trivial and much lower cost, that included particle accelerator experiments, transmutation and even anti-matter production.
Damper/meson tech allows for manipulation of the forces that build atoms, the application of such technology should also make transmutation relatively trivial.
That said, it may well be much easier to just send a mining drone to an asteroid that contains more gold or whatever element you want. Disassemble and separate the elements in said asteroid and you would reduce the value of elements to less than that of dust.
Such asteroids exist in our solar system, they likely can be found in most systems of similar population stars.
Makers are assembler/disassembler, CAD/CAM, 3D printers, on stroids. They need the correct raw materials to make their stuff, the correct raw materials may even include chips that are better manufactured in dedicated chip manufactories.
Traveller fusion power makes any process that requires lots of energy in the here and now relativley trivial and much lower cost, that included particle accelerator experiments, transmutation and even anti-matter production.
Damper/meson tech allows for manipulation of the forces that build atoms, the application of such technology should also make transmutation relatively trivial.
That said, it may well be much easier to just send a mining drone to an asteroid that contains more gold or whatever element you want. Disassemble and separate the elements in said asteroid and you would reduce the value of elements to less than that of dust.
Such asteroids exist in our solar system, they likely can be found in most systems of similar population stars.
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Exactly.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
The ultimate recycling technology. Strip the protons from people's trash and reassemble needed elements.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Seriously though, imagine unscrupulous player characters landing on low tech planets and stealing people's trash to break down into the elements they need for repairs or whatever they're doing. Ship machine shops might carry mining gear just to cut up rocks so the matter transmutation gear can make elements for the fabricators.
What? Players taking advantage of lower TL Worlds? I am sure that would never happen.
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
I'm thinking the equipment to do atomic manipulation is rather large. Like the size of a bay weapon.
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Just go outside of any polity and find a lower TL planet with human like people and set up shop by dragging a heavy metal asteroid to the planet and use it to buy a little fiefdom. The possibilities are vast when you chuck off the idea that a couple large empires control all of space.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I prefer the traditional method.
How was this not exactly what I was saying?
MonsterX
Emperor Mongoose
obviously, it could go either way in a SF setting depending on what assumptions you make. But unlimited cheap transmutation basically makes trade and prospecting pointless. It also makes it hard to come up with resource limits to drive the plot. Trade is a part of the game. Resources limits are a way to make the game interesting. So either putting practical limits on transmutation (like economic ones), or assuming it isn't a thing at all, is necessary if you want a gritty hardscrabble setting.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Scarcity driving up cost does not pass the "trivial for a TL9 culture" test.
With the maneuver drive and fusion power asteroid mining and effectively unlimited quantities of elements become available.
Here is the real world we have identified several asteroids that contain enough gold, platinum, copper, rare earths etc to completely devalue those materials to worthless - if they could be refined at minimal cost. TL9 grants space industry minimal costs to do this. The trick would be for the mining companies to limit the supply rather than crash the value - which is something the megacorporations must be doing otherwise the Imperium would be post scarcity.
With the maneuver drive and fusion power asteroid mining and effectively unlimited quantities of elements become available.
Here is the real world we have identified several asteroids that contain enough gold, platinum, copper, rare earths etc to completely devalue those materials to worthless - if they could be refined at minimal cost. TL9 grants space industry minimal costs to do this. The trick would be for the mining companies to limit the supply rather than crash the value - which is something the megacorporations must be doing otherwise the Imperium would be post scarcity.
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Nothing in the 3I economy makes sense. An absolute monarchy in a post Age of Enlightenment human civilization makes no sense.
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MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Which would result in widespread revolutions and total chaos. Anyone who understands human nature realizes the 3I could never exist.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Could also be lower levelled technological solutions that are good enough, which upgrading to a higher one has costs that few want to invest in.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
I wonder.
What difference is there between an absolute monarch and a dictator with absolute power who passes it to his son? A dictator with absolute power has certainly occurred in a post Age of Enlightenment world. What does it matter what the dictator calls himself?
All government comes down to is power. Mao said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. In Charted Space political power grows out of warships in orbit. No one believes that the Emperor has a divine right to rule. They believe he has the military power to rule.
The worlds are like separate little boxes. Communication and movement between the boxes takes weeks, months, or even years. Events on one don't affect the others. Things would have to be so bad in each little box of 10,000 boxes all at the same time for long enough that all the boxes risk the wrath of the Imperial Navy to revolt. All else ends up in a game of revolt whack-a-mole. Only the Solomani got away with a successful revolt, and that took a relatively high level of ethnic and cultural unity and a centuries-long military buildup.
It's something like how relatively few guards control a far greater number of prisoners. The prisoners are all separated in cells. In Charted Space, the worlds and the realities of interstellar travel and communication are the cells, and the guards are the Imperial Navy. This invalidates many of the assumptions relied on when thinking about this sort of thing.
Populations don't have the power to enforce their will on anything outside their worlds. A billion people can't do anything outside their world if they don't have the fleet power to both protect their star system and project military force. They can riot as much as they want, they'll only be hurting themselves. They can form a citizen army with its fist raised to the sky, and then sit there. Worlds are by nature very vulnerable to defeat in detail, or simply being bypassed and ignored. They can't form a gigantic interstellar mob and march on Capital to guillotine the Emperor. They'd need a fleet more powerful than the Imperial Navy.
Planetary spokesman: "We raise a flag of Freedom! Here's to Liberty, the Rights of Humaniti, and Interstellar Revolution!
Imperial naval commander: "Execute firing solution. Open fire."
In Charted Space, only one world experienced the Age of Enlightenment, Terra. The Solomani spread the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment far and wide, but how well were those ideas received by worlds which never had anything like them in their cultural tradition? After the Long Night, did worlds outside of the Solomani Sphere even remember them? Perhaps like democracy in Athens, they lasted for a time, then were swept away.
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MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Damn good question. However, it is better to ask WHY, in post enlightenment era civilizations did the hereditary, absolute monarchs and the claim to such positions disappear. There is only one example of a absolute dictator passing to a son and that is a tiny country that is protected from total implosion/explosion by a super power next door.
The answer is that once people realized that the monarch didn't rule by divine right they lost their power.
There are plenty of other viable philosophies that do not draw from Western roots. China is an obvious one - while modern China does have some western influences, at its core it's still Confucian and meritocratic. Britain and Japan have retained figurehead monarchs... Japan transitioned theirs into a ceremonial post in the medieval period. (Then did the same with the Shogun)
If anything, the Japanese Emperor's divine status ENHANCED them moving them away from the grubby reality of power and politics. The British monarch has headed in the same direction, although they're technically God's representative on Earth, not divine as such. I guess they're a lot like how the Shogun became, in that regard.
I'm also hearing a bit of a confusion about absolute monarchs and the Enlightenment. A lot of people get those in the wrong order... the Enlightenment came first, with the theory of absolute Monarchy developing from Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment is generally taken to start in the 17th Century, Absolute Monarchism is more of an 18th Century thing. Medieval monarchs may well have been Tyrants on occasion, but they ruled with their aristocracy and commons, not in spite of them. Trying to do so is what got Charles I executed in 1649.
For that matter, primogeniture wasn't generally used until surprisingly late in the medieval period. There was a general trend for the eldest son to be the heir, but typically whichever one was able to garner the most support from the barons was usually the next king. Sometimes they even avoided a civil war (but actually not often).
If anything, the Japanese Emperor's divine status ENHANCED them moving them away from the grubby reality of power and politics. The British monarch has headed in the same direction, although they're technically God's representative on Earth, not divine as such. I guess they're a lot like how the Shogun became, in that regard.
I'm also hearing a bit of a confusion about absolute monarchs and the Enlightenment. A lot of people get those in the wrong order... the Enlightenment came first, with the theory of absolute Monarchy developing from Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment is generally taken to start in the 17th Century, Absolute Monarchism is more of an 18th Century thing. Medieval monarchs may well have been Tyrants on occasion, but they ruled with their aristocracy and commons, not in spite of them. Trying to do so is what got Charles I executed in 1649.
For that matter, primogeniture wasn't generally used until surprisingly late in the medieval period. There was a general trend for the eldest son to be the heir, but typically whichever one was able to garner the most support from the barons was usually the next king. Sometimes they even avoided a civil war (but actually not often).
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